While we don’t often think about - or care - how Google works, it is very very important for anyone who is using search engine optimization, or natural search marketing for their business to understand the basic principles that drive the Google search engine.

In simple terms, there are three main parts to Google: Googlebot, The Indexer, and the Query Processor. Understanding how each of these three parts works is very important to online businesses, believe it or not. Let’s take a look at each of the Google elements to see how they work.

Googlebot is the search engine spider that visits your website and spiders your pages. It isn’t an actual spider, of course.

It actually works more like a web browser by calling a server and requesting pages, and downloading them - just as you do when you open your browser, type in an URI, and then the web page loads.

Googlebot, however, is run by numerous computers and performs this task much faster than one user could on their home or work computer. Googlebot also doesn’t know that a website exists until a URL is put into their Add URL form, or until they find a link to that website on another web page.

When Googlebot comes to a page, they take all the links from that page, and put them in a queue for crawling, and repeat this process over and over again. Once Googlebot has found a link, and downloaded the page, it hands that page off to the Indexer.

The Indexer stores the pages in Google’s Index Database. The Index then sorts all of the pages in its database, alphabetically, by looking at all of the keywords on the pages. The Indexer does not pay any attention to what Google calls stop words, such as is, on, or, why, how, etc. It just pays attention to more important keyword type words.

The Indexer, after Indexing pages, waits for the Google Query Processor to ask it for a list of documents. A keyword is given by the Query Processor, which in turn asks the Indexer for a list of websites that contain that keyphrase.

The Indexer then supplies the Query processor with a list of the documents, and the Query processor presents the documents to the user who requested the keyword.

You see, each element is important to the others. It all starts with the Googlebot finding your webpage link on another site, or by you going to Google and using the Add form to submit your site.